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Metro TimeBlock is a time display control that I’ve made which should allow you to display time in any color and with any background you want. Size is also adjustable and you can choose to display either the current time or a time of your own.

Properties of the control:

Time – takes in any DateTime object. The control will display the Time you provide within that DateTime object. Leave blank if you want to display the current time.

Spacer – this is the string to display between the hours and minutes and between the minutes and seconds. Use spacers like “:” or ” “.

Size – you can choose from Small, Normal, Medium, MediumLarge, Large, ExtraLarge, ExtraExtraLarge and Huge. Chose to do this instead of allowing FontSize because this way I can also control the way the background blocks look.

Foreground – tells the control what color to use to display the time.

Fill – sets the background color of the control (the square-like blocks).

That’s about it. If you got any problems with it / need help, leave a comment below. The download link is also below and it contains both the control and a couple of samples.

To get you started you will need an ISO image of Windows 8 and also the Windows 7 USB / DVD Donwload Tool which will help you put that image on the USB stick. You can download both of them by clicking their respective images below.

Install the Windows 7 USb Tool after download finishes. Don’t worry about the name of the program which says Windows 7, it works just fine with Windows 8 as well.

Now that you have all the needed files insert your USB drive into the PC, right click it and select format. Most tutorial’s I’ve seen say to format it to FAT32 otherwise it will not work – tho when I use the tool to copy the windows files to the USB drive, the tool formats my drive to NTFS. Strange, but whatever.

Quick format it as FAT32 and don’t forget to backup your data!

Now that you’ve formatted the USB drive open up the Windows 7 USb Tool, hit Browse and select the ISO image you’ve just downloaded.

Click Next and on the next screen asking you to select the media type choose USB device. As you can see you are also given the option of writing the image directly to a DVD. For this how-to we will stick with the USB.

Choose the USB device on which you want the tool to put the install files and hit Begin copying.

The tool will now start copying the windows install files to your USB drives.

Once the entire process is complete and if you got no errors during it restart your computer, bring up your boot menu (F12 in my case – during POST) and select the USB drive. If your USB drive doesn’t show up in that list, go into your BIOS and make sure that Legacy USB Support is Enabled.

Notes:

– you can not make a bootable USB drive with 64bit Windows on it if you are currently running a 32bit operating system. You need to have a 64bit operating system in order to make a bootable USB drive with 64bit windows on it.

– the USB drive has to be large enough. 4 GB will do for the simple 32bit and 64bit versions but for the 64bit containing the developer tools you will need a 8 GB drive – because the size of the ISO alone is 4.7 GB.

– make sure you backup the data you got on that USB drive before formatting it. Otherwise it-s lost. And also, carefully choose the partition on which you install the OS, not to overwrite your good Windows install by mistake – because in this case also, all data will be lost.

And one last thing: Published from a fresh copy of Windows 8. So you know for sure that it works.

Are you a Silverlight / WPF developer? Want to start developing for Windows 8 as well? If that’s the case, this upcoming SilverlightShow webinar is guaranteed to give you a jump start. The webinar will teach you how to use your Silverlight / WPF experience to build amazing Windows 8 apps by presenting the similarities between Silverlight / WPF and XAML based Metro apps. This will be done by looking at a working Metro app containing most of the things you were used to in Silverlight / WPF.

The method above can only convert 8 characters ARGB color codes.
In order to convert simple RGB codes too we will check for the length of the string (9 = ARGB and 7 = RGB) and in case it’s 7 we will add the alpha to our string as FF ( 255 – opaque) and only then return the color.

We should also do something in case the hex color code is not actually a hex color code. So add another if statement after the one we added already and check again for the length of the string; if it’s not equal to 9 then it’s not good so feel free to return any color you want (I will return transparent). The final method looks like this:

Getting the current GPS location on a Windows Phone device is rather easy. In order to start you will need to add a reference to System.Device in your project and then a using statement inside the class that you want to get the geo-location.

using System.Device.Location;

Next we would need to declare an object of type GeoCoordinateWatcher. For better access I will declare it as a class member and not as a local variable inside some method.

GeoCoordinateWatcher geoWatcher = null;

Next to do is: create an instance of GeoCoordinateWatcher, create an event handler for the position changed event and then start reading the data. So, to create an instance of GeoCoordinateWatcher go to the class constructor and copy the following code:

geoWatcher = new GeoCoordinateWatcher();

This will create a GeoCoordinateWatcher object in the variable we previously declared. In case the location you need has to have a certain accuracy, the class provides you with an overload for the contructor which takes your desired accuracy as a parameter.

geoWatcher = new GeoCoordinateWatcher(GeoPositionAccuracy.High);

Next create an event handler for the PositionChanged event. You can do this by typing geoWatcher.PositionChanged += and then press the TAB key twice; this will automatically create the event handler for you. After creating the event handler, all you need to do is use geoWatcher.Start() to start reading coordinates. Now your code should look like this:

Next we want to get the coordinates for our location. That is really simple. You can get them in a GeoCoordinate object by accesing e.Position.Location in the event handler, or if you want to get them as individual values you can save e.Position.Location.Latitude, e.Position.Location.Longitude and e.Position.Location.Altitude in three double variables. Example below:

That’s it. Now if you want to get rid of the object and stop reading the current location after reading the first set of values you can simply add the following lines of code to the event handler. Otherwise you can create a method for it and call it whenever you wish.

geoWatcher.Stop();
geoWatcher.Dispose();
geoWatcher = null;

In order to test the code I just wrote I will add three textboxes to my application in which I will write the data I read in them. You can do the same. Anyways that’s it. If you got any questions leave a comment and I’ll answer them asap.

This is the demo Microsoft made at CES this year demonstrating some of the new features of the upcoming Windows 8. One of the features that caught my attention was the Windows Store which they say it will open in late February. A new build of Windows 8 is also said to come in late February.

Also, in the video there’s a small presentation of a HTML5 app called Cut the Rope – really nice app in my opinion. Can’t wait to try it out myself.

Okay, so what I will do here is explain you how to create your own code snippets to use in Visual Studio 2010 without using any add-ins related to snippet designing. A post on snippet designers / explorers and how you can use them to build better snippets faster will come sometime next week I believe, but this time I can’t promise.

PART 1: CREATING A SIMPLE CODE SNIPPET

So let’s get started. Open up your Visual Studio and go to File – New File (or Ctrl + N) and create a new XML file. Don’t worry about the file’s name at this point as it is not that important. An XML file with a line of code will automatically be generated for you. So, the first thing we need to do in this brand new file is to add the CodeSnippets namespace and a CodeSnippet element to it right after the first line; to do so copy-paste the code below:

Now we can really start work on our snippet. First thing we need to do is set up the header of our snippet. The header can contain various information like the Title, Description, Author, Keywords in case you want to make your snippet available online, a Shortcut for your snipped and also a HelpUrl where people can go and ask for help in case something doesn’t work as expected. I suggest you always add a title and a description to your snippets even if they are not mandatory.

The code which we want the snipped to insert must be added in the Code element of the Snippet between <![CDATA[ and ]]> brackets. In this example, as you’ve probably figured out from the description, our code snippet will simply display a message box containing the text “Hello World!”. Bellow you can see how the Code element of the snippet looks like after adding the code.

As you can see above, my Code element has a property named Language which is set to CSharp. Make sure that you set that language accordingly. You can write code snippets for VB, CSharp, VJSharp and XML.

Also, another element which you can add to the Snippet is References. Unfortunately this is not supported for C# so you will have to add them manually in our case. Otherwise, here’s how you can add a reference:

Now that we’re done writing the snippet it’s time to save it. So File – Save as to the following path:

Drive:\...\Documents\Visual Studio Version\Code Snippets\Language\

which in our case is

Drive:\...\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual C#\

using the .snippet file extension – for example messagebox.snippet.

Now that you’ve saved it, it’s time to add it to your Visual Studio 2010. So go to Tools – Code Snippets Manager (or Ctrl + K, Ctrl + B), click on Import and open the snippet we previously saved. After opening it you will be asked to which languages to add it, in our case simply check Visual C#.

Create a new project or open an already existing one (C# project) and go somewhere where you can write some C# code. Now, inserting a snippet can be done two ways: one – hit Ctrl + K, Ctrl + X, select Visual C# (or any other language for that matter) and then select the snippet you want to insert (ours is called MessageBox – we set this name using the Title tag); – second way is by typing the shortcut (ours is called hellobox – we set this name using the Shortcut tag in the header) and pressing double TAB. And there you go, your snippet is inserted.

PART 2: USING LITERALS

Now that you know how to create, save and use a code snippet it’s time to learn how to create a little bit more complex ones – and here I’m referring to literals.

Since I couldn’t think of a better definition for literals, here’s the one I found on msdn:

The Literal element is used to identify a replacement for a piece of code that is entirely contained within the snippet, but will likely be customized after it is inserted into the code.

So let’s say you have a code snippet in which you use a variable name 10 times. You insert that code snippet into your code and you decide that the variable name must be changed so you go ahead and replace the old variable name with the new variable name in all 10 cases. What literals allow you to do is define a piece of code inside your snippet which you can use several times, and after you insert that snippet into your code if you change that defined piece of code in one place, then it will change in all the other places where you used it. You can think of them as variables if you want.

So, let’s put them in practice. Let’s create a code snippet for inserting dependency properties in our silverlight projects. The code for registering a dependency property with a property changed event handler is the one below:

As you can see, each of my literals has three fields: ID – used to identify replaceable portions of code, Default – representing the default value of the literal when the snippet is inserted and ToolTip which is a small description of he literal which shows up at mouse over.

Having these literals set up what we need to next is replace the already defined names and types in our code with literals. This is done by using $ID$ instead of the predefined value (ex: $PropertyName$, $PropertyType$, $ClassName$).

This is how your code should look like inside the snippet after adding the literals:

Code snippets are a great way of improving your productivity because they allow you to define pieces of code which you can later on insert into your projects by using a short alias.

Although they’ve been in Visual Studio for quite some time not many people know what they are, what exactly they do and how to use them in their advantage. Hearing about them is one thing, using them it’s another thing. Almost every one of us (those who write code) used them at least once in our lives and the best example I can think of while saying this is: foreach. I mean, how many times have you typed in foreach and then pressed TAB twice for some code to magically appear at your cursor’s location? Yea, that’s a code snippet! And there is a lot more from where that came from. There are code snippets for things like class definition, constructors, destructors, structures, for, do-while, etc. and a complete list (for C#) can be found here: Visual C# Default Code Snippets.

But those are just a small part of what code snippets can offer, those are the default code snippets that come with Visual Studio. The really nice thing about code snippets is that you can define your own and then use them to insert code in your projects wherever and whenever you want. I will try and create a simple tutorial on how to create your own code snippet sometime next week, until then you can check out this page.

For those of you looking for a couple of general snippets to add to the already existing one, there’s a nice project on codeplex which contains exactly 38 C# code snippets ready to be added to your collection. Adding them to your Visual Studio is easy: just download the zip file from the link mentioned above and extract the file. Then go to Tools -> Code Snippet Manager or press Ctrl + K, Ctrl + B and click on Import. Browse to the folder where you’ve extracted the zip file, select all the code snippets inside the folder and hit Open, then select which folder / category to add them in (My Code Snippets by default) and click finish. And voila! they are ready to be used. To try them out and see if they really work you can try for example typing task or thread somewhere and hitting TAB twice – your code should be automatically inserted.

So, that’s it for now. As I’ve promised, how to create your own code snippets and maybe also something about some snippet designers coming up next week.

Those of you wanting to learn more about metro design and how to make your apps look as metro-ish as possible should know that a new series of articles called “31 Days of Windows Phone Metro Design” has just started.

The first article in the series (about the metro design principles) is already up. A link to the post and to all the upcoming ones can be found here.

Articles will pop up once a week, maybe twice so be sure to check them out.

Just letting you know that there’s an upcoming webinar on the 4th of this month about Windows Azure and how we can benefit from it in Windows Phone. The webinar will be presented by Samidip Basu and has the following agenda: